Glad to be back. In this video I'm going to tell you a bit of a historical story, perhaps a story with a moral about learning from other people's design mistakes and taking advantage of them. And it's a story about what are now ubiquitous, automated teller machines. The machines you go to to get cash today do many more things. But at one time, they were not so common, and in fact, a little bit scary. So let's talk for a minute about early cash machines. Even in the late 60s, people were developing prototypes and deploying the very earliest of these machines sitting in the walls of bank branches. The first one believed to be in England, and then spreading in different places around the world. And they existed for one major purpose, so that you could get money when your bank branch was closed. If you wanted to deposit money, you would actually take an envelope, and if you were a business, a heavy fabric envelope. And you'd have a way to put this into a night depository where would go into a vault and be opened the next day. But to get money after hours was a big deal. I know this. I was growing up in New York City, and I remember that getting money from a bank was a challenge. Because banks were open bankers' hours, 9 in the morning till maybe 3 in the afternoon, Monday through Friday. If you were lucky, they might have been open till 6 one day a week, and in the morning on a Saturday. And going to the bank meant perhaps taking time off from work or using up the few hours you had on a weekend. And if you needed money in the middle of the week, you needed some other way to get that money. For most of us, the way we got that money was that we wrote a check, often to a supermarket, where the grocer would cash your check as long as they knew you and you hadn't had problems. But that era was changing. And as I was growing up, we started to see some of these machines appear on bank branches. In fact I remember one, the savings bank where I was living. And my father was one of the early people who got this special card to use the cash machine. Now to tell you how paranoid everyone was, I have to tell you some of the rules of this machine. One, it didn't take money out of your regular bank account. You had to have a special account just for the money you might want to take out of the machine. You also had to have $200 in the account plus anything you wanted to withdraw. So that if you had $250 in the account, you could withdraw 50 but no more because no one was really sure if you might trick the machine into taking more money. And 200 was the most you could take out in a day so that was a little bit of a safety valve. And by the way a day meant a banker's day so you could take $200 out over the weekend. But most of all this bank machine, this cash machine, had all sorts of circumstances under which it would do something to protect itself and your money. It would eat your card. When would it eat your card? Well you had a four digit PIN code, and if you entered the code wrong, I think it was a third time, it would keep your card. If you tried to withdraw more money than you were allowed, it would keep your card. If you tried to withdraw any money when you had under $200 in the account, it would keep your card. People had stories about the machines that ate their cards. And researchers had shown that at that time, once somebody had that card eaten, you could go back to the branch and get it back. But the majority of people who had their card eaten basically told the branch, keep the card, close the account. I don't want to deal with this thing. Well, there was a bank that learned something from this lesson, this user experience usability lesson. It was First National City Bank of New York. It deployed automated teller machines based on a dip interface. That dip meant that instead of putting your card into a slot and having it disappear and given back to you, you would dip your card in and pull it back out, as about half the machines today do. And they promoted aggressively the fact that your fingers never leave the card, so the machine can't, can't eat your card. Now this was remarkably successful. Now we've gotta go a little bit further than this. It wasn't just that the machine couldn't eat your card. They deployed them everywhere. They had a huge marketing campaign. They adopted a new motto, The Citi Never Sleeps and the name, CitiBank. They actually had originally been City Bank with a Y, then National City Bank, then First National City Bank. But they came back to Citibank. The person who was in charge of their ATM deployment, John Reed, later became the CEO of Citibank, largely because they did something that was virtually unprecedented in banking. They got huge numbers of people to leave their current bank and change to move their accounts to Citibank. Because they had understood that they could make getting your money easy and pleasant, and most important, comfortable and risk-free. So what have we learned from this study? A little design mistake can cause a miserable user experience. People hate the idea of having something that was theirs eaten by a machine. And if you do this right, maybe you too one day will become the CEO and president of a top corporation when you learn from your competitors' mistakes and adopt user centered design.
